Awakening Orchestra, Shapeshifter Lab, 11/11/16

ShapeShifter Plus is proud to present election year: a Work in progress part III: ‘ethos, pathos, logos.’ on Friday, November11 at 7:00PM at Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn, NY. election year: a Work in progress is a three-part symphonic work composed by KyleSaulnier and presented in conjunction with ShapeShifter Plus. Composed across the entire span of the election year as events unfold, each of the three performances add new movements and material that is relevant to both the 2016 election cycle in real time and to the dates on which the performance occur. The first installment entitled ‘free labor, free land, free men’ premiered in March, and the second segment, ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ premiered in July and received critical acclaim. Read the great review from New York Music Daily critic Alan Young here.

Named for Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion, ethos, pathos, logos. explores the nature of the remaining candidates’ appeals to their constituencies as the 2016 election cycle comes to a close. Faced with a strife-ridden campaign season where it appears as though our civil liberties are on the line, the movement's premiere on Veteran’s Day is an opportunity to acknowledge that those liberties been earned through the tremendous sacrifice of so many. As this is also a mere three days after the general election, the piece will be be prepared to accommodate the result.

As leader of the Awakening Orchestra, Bronx-based composer Kyle Saulnier is steadily slicing his way through the modern musical landscape, consistently fusing the jazz vocabulary with orchestral techniques and a rock music punch. AlexanderAbnos of WNYC has called his music "lush and inventive," and KarlAckermann of All About Jazz calls the Orchestra's 2014 debut "as rare an achievement as CarlaBley's Escalator Over the Hill... [a] tour-de-force and one of the best albums of the year."

With an emphasis on post-modern third-stream music, the Connecticut-raised Saulnier combines the industrial- and alt-rock attitudes of his youth with Romantic and modern classical music, the post-bop driven Hartford jazz legacy, and even elements of the modern industrial, hip-hop, and electronic genres. Possessing a flair for the dramatic in all his works, he has carved a signature sound that is at once recognizable and unreplicable.